PLUS I got it from a lass who is too small for it, and it has less than 9,000 miles on it, and I bought it for about 8 grand less than its new price, and no tax. Wooo. It is a puredee home run, I yam telling you. Bam!!! Yeeha!! I have been driving a fourc-ylinder Corolla s/w for ten years, over 200000 miles. I am just all stoked about my new (V6) car, which gets as good orbetter gas mileage.

Rapaire's analysis is also spot on, of course, but it applies to an alternate universe, kind of like those analysts who think Obama's stunning speech was about Wright. It was about right.

Tsk, tsk. Yet another Southern Californian expressing his or her love, nay, lust for a car. I have no doubt that Amos spent the night running his hands over the car in the same way and with the same look in his eyes that he used to reserve for those humans he loved. He'll be taking the car out to "dinner" next, filling it with premium gasolines and putting bumper stickers on that say things like "My other car is a Klingon battle cruiser" and "They'll take my gun when they pry it from my cold dead hands." Before this stage is over he will have installed a gun rack and a CB radio and be hanging around truck stops and gun shows, talking about how he prefers the .308 over the 7.62 x 56 cartridge (even though they're the same damned thing) and listening to bad C&W music. Eventually, the last stages will set in and Amos will be wearing a "gimme cap" from John Deere or Caterpillar, chewing Red Man tobacco, and have a Marine Corps decal and an NRA decal in the corners of the back window.

So sad...immediate intervention is needed, but that usually leads to the fantasy by the intervenee that s/he is a surfer person and all that implies.

I urge either immediate euthanasia or immediate lobotomy, or perhaps in this case, both.

I finally went out and got the car of my perfervid little dreams!! It's

B Y O O O T I F U L!!!!!

It's a 2007 Rav4 Limited. It turns on its interior lights for you when you open the door. It lets you make phone calls from the steering wheel as well as control the audio -- ay of 6 CDs or the raddieaux. It has leather seats that whirr around when you push something. It has electric seat warmers. It has headlights and a horn and a v^ engine full of pizazzz and it glistens like silver. It is ROOMY but graceful and stylish yet useful.

I yam in love with my car!!! I am so thrilled I could just vibrate into bits.

My 1994 station wagon is taking its 200,000 mile odometer to the KPBS Olde Car's Home tomorrow.

So I see that freds is finally back after a long absence. Har. Big frikkin' deal. Har. I was already sick of freds a long time ago. Har. I would rather hear from lizards, frankly. Har. Freds are annoying because they keep saying "Har" all the time. Har. Go away, freds.

and that idiot Lynndie England, who told a German newspaper this week that "I guess after the picture came out the insurgency picked up and Iraqis attacked the Americans and the British and they attacked in return and they were just killing each other. I felt bad about it ... no, I felt pissed off. If the media hadn't exposed the pictures to that extent, then thousands of lives would have been saved."

Yes, I thought "The Age of Innocence" was a great film all around. Daniel Day-Lewis is always marvelous in whatever part he plays, and everyone else in it was excellent as well. Winona, for a change, played a young woman in that one who at least seemed not to be terribly smart, but she turned out in the longrun to be smarter than people might have suspected.

She's very good for roles in such movies (period pieces set in the 1800s or 1700s or some such time period). She has the right look for it.

The think I like about Winona is that she has almost always been cast in offbeat movies, usually with pretty intelligent scripts, and she has usually played rather complex characters. She has not followed the typical Hollywood starlet route at all in her career (quite aside from that unfortunate shoplifting incident).

Winona is a very interesting character, more by far than just a pretty face. I am attracted to intelligence and complexity in women, plus subtlety. I like a kind of inner strength that isn't blatantly overt or aggressive in presenting itself....but it's definitely there.

When I was a boy and ol' Shep was a pup If I didn't keep feedin' him he'd never shut up He was finally so heavy he broke through the floor And we spent a bunch for a new basement door. --Sung by Sheep Woolly, 1948